Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

[grond]

Originally Posted by roondar

As for pricing, I honestly have no idea. Generally speaking computers with expansion slots were more expensive than those without. But that's about as far as I got.

Yes. And for some mysterious reason Commodore never considered selling upgrades to their computers but left all this market to others. So to them the extra expenditure for slots and connectors was money thrown away.

Makes you wonder if such a different entity would've bothered with the A500 to begin with.

I already stated that Commodore shouldn't have addressed us as their customers but the unimaginative Mac customers...

Looking at 1991, accelerators featuring a 68030 were indeed expensive. I found an add in the march 1991 issue of Amiga Format were a 16MHz 68030 accelerator for the A2000

...a computer that should at least have had an 020...

While it is true that the 50MHz 030 became much more popular around 1994, it was definitely not the fastest Amiga you could get at the time.

Amiga or A1200? No doubt about the A4000 but 040 accelerators for the A1200 were a very brief period before they were turned into 060 accelerators. And housing 040s in an A1200 was problematic. I'm not sure a 33 MHz or 40 MHz 040 in an A1200 would be a great idea. The 25 MHz 040 is only a little faster than the 50 MHz 030 not considering FPU stuff.

Reading back my post I see perhaps didn't make this clear. But what I was trying to get at was that the performance was so much better than I had expected, that I wouldn't be surprised if a slower 68030 would also do 'well enough'. Say a 33MHz one with a somewhat smaller window.
You could get a 40MHz 68030 for your A1200 in 1993, though. And by 1995 you could get 040's and 060's as well.

Yes, c2p really just means you need one CPU grade higher. This did make a significant price difference but eventually there were plenty of options to chose from. The problem remained that there was no upgrade path for the budget buyers. There only was a giant gap between the 7 MHz 68000 and the people that did upgrade. If this gap had been narrower (one CPU grade less because of chunky mode, on the upper end, one CPU grade higher on the lower end), things could have been different.

There are some advantages to planar over chunky even in an 8 plane configuration, though I admit these are small. One example: it is much easier and much cheaper to implement transparency effects (such as fake alpha channel) with a planar graphics mode.

Hardly a consideration. Can you come up with another example?

I'm no chip designer so take this as you will. As I've understood it, part of the reason the Amiga was so hard to upgrade was the tight integration of the custom chips with the video system, which apparently made upgrading it much harder.

Are we talking about Commodore's point of view or the customers'?

Obviously, you could have an Amiga with user replaceable graphics cards instead. But wouldn't that cause the same kind of performance penalties the PC had to cope with? It didn't really shrug of the problems that brought about until the mid 1990's.

RTG does really well for productivity. Games would have required the same CPU grunt as the PC world required. But this is not due to the nature of chunky or planar, this is just the clever concept of having a copper, DMA from arbitrary locations in chipmem and a barrel shifter for horizontal scrolling. This is nothing that wouldn't work in a chunky mode.

[coder76]

There are perhaps some advantages still with planar graphics, like being able to have several independent scrolling layers; especially useful for vertical scrolling, when you don't need HW support for smooth scrolling. This is not possible with chunky pixels.

Running games in 4-6 bitplanes still saves bandwidth compared to 8 bit chunky. And a c2p doesn't need to use exactly all 8 bitplanes, but you can use any number of bitplanes, with 4-8 being most common. A lower amount of bitplanes speed up c2p conversion a lot. Then you can also use a scrambled chunky buffer which would reduce the number of c2p passes needed. But there are various scrambled formats. While a scrambled format would perhaps not be faster for general texturemapping, it can work well for some special cases.

Also, AGA video modes can be tweaked to produce a direct hardware chunky screen with 2x1 pixels, this was done in Virtual Karting game, and it is certainly fast on an unexpanded A1200.

[grond]

As for the 14 MHz 020 in a chunky-AGA A1200 running Doom in a smaller window: I guess we would need someone willing to edit away the c2p routine in Doom and just run the timedemo (with garbled output) to see whether this claim could hold. I have my doubts because the clock speed is too low but who knows...

[vulture]

@roondar

Yup, that's indeed one step smaller and running worse than on 68030@50. Can't tell if detail is set to high or low though, they do seem very similar to me, can't really discern between them without A-B comparison. Low detail seems to turn the pixel resolution from 1:1 to 2:1, am I correct?

[grond]

Originally Posted by coder76

There are perhaps some advantages still with planar graphics, like being able to have several independent scrolling layers; especially useful for vertical scrolling, when you don't need HW support for smooth scrolling. This is not possible with chunky pixels.

You mean having more than one layer scrolling in different directions? Because scrolling a chunky layer in hardware is no different from scrolling planar layers.

Running games in 4-6 bitplanes still saves bandwidth compared to 8 bit chunky.

How many times do I have to say that the 4/6 bitplane planar modes should NOT go away only because there should have been an 8 bit chunk mode?

And a c2p doesn't need to use exactly all 8 bitplanes, but you can use any number of bitplanes, with 4-8 being most common. A lower amount of bitplanes speed up c2p conversion a lot. Then you can also use a scrambled chunky buffer which would reduce the number of c2p passes needed. But there are various scrambled formats. While a scrambled format would perhaps not be faster for general texturemapping, it can work well for some special cases.

All of which is better than a chunky mode in what exact way? None.

Also, AGA video modes can be tweaked to produce a direct hardware chunky screen with 2x1 pixels, this was done in Virtual Karting game, and it is certainly fast on an unexpanded A1200.

Are we talking about copper chunky with either giant pixels or miniature windows and needing 32 bits per pixel for a fixed 4096 colours display. Great, just great...

[coder76]

Originally Posted by grond

You mean having more than one layer scrolling in different directions? Because scrolling a chunky layer in hardware is no different from scrolling planar layers.




How many times do I have to say that the 4/6 bitplane planar modes should NOT go away only because there should have been an 8 bit chunk mode?





All of which is better than a chunky mode in what exact way? None.




Are we talking about copper chunky with either giant pixels or miniature windows and needing 32 bits per pixel for a fixed 4096 colours display. Great, just great...

Well, yes I meant several layers with different speeds. These colorreduced c2p's are again used to save memory bandwidth. If you only have a chunky hardware display, but not improved chip ram speed, a color reduced c2p's can well be faster than an 8 bit chunky hardware display. Virtual Karting did not use copper chunky screen, I'm not sure exactly how it was done, but works only under AGA.

[grond]

Originally Posted by coder76

These colorreduced c2p's are again used to save memory bandwidth. If you only have a chunky hardware display...

How many times do I have to say that the 4-6 bitplane planar modes should NOT go away only because there should have been an 8 bit chunky mode?

Virtual Karting did not use copper chunky screen, I'm not sure exactly how it was done, but works only under AGA.

That would be interesting to know but I don't expect the result to show that planar graphics were an advantage...

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by grond

You are saying that porting Doom to the A1200 was impossible because the A1200 was already on the market when Doom came out? In what world does that statement make sense?

No, I'm saying that dissing the A1200 for not being suitable for a Doom port doesn't make sense when there was no Doom. How was anyone to know that this chunky pixel thing (which only makes sense for 256 colors) would soon become the standard in game graphics?

But this is the Amiga way, endless whinging about what a particular model 'should' have had, even if it was impractical or nobody thought it was necessary at the time.

No engineer in their right mind would implement an eight bit planar mode.

True, if 8 bits was all you wanted. But for 7 bits or 6 bits etc, it's necessary. So it's the same circuitry duplicated just a couple more times to go from 6 to 8 bits. In engineering it's often more prudent to extend a proven design rather than try to create something entirely new.

There is absolutely no technical reason why the Amiga couldn't have gone a similar path without automatically becoming a PC. In fact, the PC would have become something different and better if the Amiga had had more success than it had because of Commodore's poor use of its potential.

You are right - there is no technical reason the Amiga couldn't have kept going its own way. But the market was saying PC, and anything that wasn't was bound to loose (hell, most PC manufacturers themselves lost out in the end - including IBM).

I keep hearing about if only the Amiga had had this or that PC feature it would have survived. But the market was already going PC and people didn't want something that was almost the same - it had to be fully PC compatible. Commodore could have made a machine that did both (like the C128) and the Amiga part would have been ignored. And within a few short years it would go on the scrap heap along with all those 386s, and 486s, and Pentium I's, and...

[grond]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

No, I'm saying that dissing the A1200 for not being suitable for a Doom port doesn't make sense when there was no Doom. How was anyone to know that this chunky pixel thing (which only makes sense for 256 colors) would soon become the standard in game graphics?

This is a hen vs. egg argument. Game developers would often have noticed that some approaches just didn't work well with planar modes and thus not continue with a game idea they had. I bet the Last Ninja guys would have loved to have all graphics on the screen in a split second. The C=64 couldn't do it. Just in the same way "Prince of Persia" was devised on a hardware that did not scroll.

With eight bits per pixel, chunky is the natural choice regardless of whether you are still thinking exclusively inside the box of 2D scrolling games or have the vision to foresee 3D games. Yes, they did a lazy copy'n'paste job and ignored how a planar 8 bit mode only had disadvantages over a chunky mode. They wanted to become more profitable with their new product by only spending the least amount necessary to make the product APPEAR to be technically advanced when it really hardly was. No wonder it flopped. As if people wouldn't find out. In retrospect it appears shear lunacy that a company in the computer business would expect to be profitable (and hence competitive) by not spending money on development.

[activist]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

No, I'm saying that dissing the A1200 for not being suitable for a Doom port doesn't make sense when there was no Doom.

I think the argument was by having pixel mode and planer mode it would have made the incoming fps games easier to port and you would have seen much better 3d amiga games sooner which would have knock on consequences.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

How was anyone to know that this chunky pixel thing (which only makes sense for 256 colors) would soon become the standard in game graphics?

Not true. Amiga designers already conceeded that pixel mode was more efficient than planer years earlier

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

But this is the Amiga way, endless whinging about what a particular model 'should' have had, even if it was impractical or nobody thought it was necessary at the time.

In what way was a pixel and planer mode impractical. They had already developed it in labs.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

But the market was saying PC, and anything that wasn't was bound to loose (hell, most PC manufacturers themselves lost out in the end - including IBM).

rubbish. Apple survived.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

I keep hearing about if only the Amiga had had this or that PC feature it would have survived. But the market was already going PC and people didn't want something that was almost the same - it had to be fully PC compatible. Commodore could have made a machine that did both (like the C128) and the Amiga part would have been ignored. And within a few short years it would go on the scrap heap along with all those 386s, and 486s, and Pentium I's, and...

There was loads of room for PC/Amiga/Mac. You're assuming PC would have evolved the same way if Amiga was run right. All Commodore had to do was support/license software vendors and properly resource engineering

[roondar]

Originally Posted by grond

Yes. And for some mysterious reason Commodore never considered selling upgrades to their computers but left all this market to others. So to them the extra expenditure for slots and connectors was money thrown away.

Commodore sold plenty of ram expansions, accelerators, hard disk & controllers and CD-rom drives. I think they even sold a few graphics cards. I agree that they didn't do an accelerator for the A500 or A1200, but "never selling upgrades" is not true.

...a computer that should at least have had an 020...

Sure. But at least the first A2000 had real fast memory for the second 512KB and adding a 68020 to an A2000 is really easy. You could always buy an A2500 later

Amiga or A1200? No doubt about the A4000 but 040 accelerators for the A1200 were a very brief period before they were turned into 060 accelerators. And housing 040s in an A1200 was problematic. I'm not sure a 33 MHz or 40 MHz 040 in an A1200 would be a great idea. The 25 MHz 040 is only a little faster than the 50 MHz 030 not considering FPU stuff.

Amiga as a whole, which seemed to me what you were talking about in that part of your post.

Yes, c2p really just means you need one CPU grade higher. This did make a significant price difference but eventually there were plenty of options to chose from. The problem remained that there was no upgrade path for the budget buyers. There only was a giant gap between the 7 MHz 68000 and the people that did upgrade. If this gap had been narrower (one CPU grade less because of chunky mode, on the upper end, one CPU grade higher on the lower end), things could have been different.

I agree that more choices for upgrades would've been better. I'm still not so sure about your 'one grade higher' comment though, the last few examples I've found show that 50MHz 68030 A1200 not to be equal to the 40MHz 386DX videos I found (10MHz is about one grade difference), but actually better: the 386 had a smaller screen window and ran worse.

Hardly a consideration. Can you come up with another example?

You literally said "The point is that at 8 bits per pixel planar modes have ONLY disadvantages and NO advantages.".
All it takes to disprove a statement that extreme that is provide a single advantage, no matter how small. Which, despite your protest that my example is "hardly a consideration", I actually did.

It's also something that is actually used quite heavily in many of the new games currently being made by members of EAB. You can use the same trick for other things, such as cheaply implementing 'dynamic' shadows or highlights.

As stated, there's also separated layers scrolling (in up to 8 layers if you like). And if you're short on memory bandwidth, you can also be clever and only update some bit planes instead of all of them when doing certain operations. This gives you the advantage of the full 256 colours on screen, while still needing less bandwidth. It also works with anything from 1 to 8 bitplanes, unlike the sometimes supported half-chunky modes were you can only address nybbles or bytes directly.

Another neat trick, though this does work better with something like a Copper in the system, is dynamically switching bitplanes on and off during the screen to (again) save on bandwidth. This was already done in some A500 games and makes it appear you're using more colours than you really are. Thanks to planar graphics, this can be done finely grained.

Are we talking about Commodore's point of view or the customers'?

Commodore's. But again, this is just what I've heard - I'm no chip designer.

RTG does really well for productivity. Games would have required the same CPU grunt as the PC world required. But this is not due to the nature of chunky or planar, this is just the clever concept of having a copper, DMA from arbitrary locations in chipmem and a barrel shifter for horizontal scrolling. This is nothing that wouldn't work in a chunky mode.

I was referring to the software cost - allowing for multiple different graphics cards means abstracting access to the video hardware such that the OS and applications can easily support the different cards on the market. This tends to lower graphics performance due to the more complicated code path such more general code has to take. Even today this is still somewhat of a consideration. The whole reason for the Vulkan API was to reduce the levels of abstraction, bringing the software closer to the hardware. And this in turn gave you better somewhat graphics performance, especially on lower end PC's.

But then again, perhaps PC games back in 1993 just banged the hardware directly and hoped you had a compatible card. I don't actually know that.

Originally Posted by vulture

@roondar

Yup, that's indeed one step smaller and running worse than on 68030@50. Can't tell if detail is set to high or low though, they do seem very similar to me, can't really discern between them without A-B comparison. Low detail seems to turn the pixel resolution from 1:1 to 2:1, am I correct?

Comparing it to the two 386SX examples I showed (which ran in low detail mode), it certainly looks like low detail mode to me. Fits what ID themselves suggested you did on 386 machines as well. But the video doesn't say.

Originally Posted by activist

Not true. Amiga designers already conceeded that pixel mode was more efficient than planer years earlier

The AAA specs includes a 16 bit planar mode. More importantly: almost all of the 'chunky' modes in AAA are actually hybrid chunky-planar modes. The engineers clearly saw value in a planar architecture, otherwise why bother with all this "half chunky" and "hybrid' nonsense?

rubbish. Apple survived.

True, but only after getting a $150 million dollar 'loan' from Microsoft. They were hardly doing well in the second half of the 90's.

[grond]

Originally Posted by roondar

Commodore sold plenty of ram expansions, accelerators, hard disk & controllers and CD-rom drives.

And they all sucked.

I agree that more choices for upgrades would've been better. I'm still not so sure about your 'one grade higher' comment though, the last few examples I've found show that 50MHz 68030 A1200 not to be equal to the 40MHz 386DX videos I found (10MHz is about one grade difference), but actually better

May be. If you really want to know it exactly, you will have to compare 030s to 030s, though. The rough estimate I made is good enough for me. My point was that a 33 MHz 030 with planar would have come out at the speed of a 25 MHz 030 with chunky-AGA.

All it takes to disprove a statement that extreme that is provide a single advantage, no matter how small.

Hrhrhr, yes, I'm guilty of overusing extremes.

It's also something that is actually used quite heavily in many of the new games currently being made by members of EAB. You can use the same trick for other things, such as cheaply implementing 'dynamic' shadows or highlights.

Yes, people use what's available to them. To me that doesn't make the 1000th scrolling shooter more interesting...

The AAA specs includes a 16 bit planar mode. More importantly: almost all of the 'chunky' modes in AAA are actually hybrid chunky-planar modes. The engineers clearly saw value in a planar architecture, otherwise why bother with all this "half chunky" and "hybrid' nonsense?

I never liked the AAA features I heard about. The only use for chunky/planar modes are planar overlays over chunky images like they use a lot for video titleing.

True, but only after getting a $150 million dollar 'loan' from Microsoft. They were hardly doing well in the second half of the 90's.

Well, that's a fair bit longer than Commodore...

[nogginthenog]

Everyone seems to be concentrating on games but planar modes have a huge advantage for a multitasking OS. You need only the memory that is necessary for your screen depth. I don't need 256 colours for a word processor, 4 is just fine. Chunky modes use a fixed number of bytes per pixel (I appreciate there may be some funky VGA modes).

The AmigaOS concept of Intuition Screens is just great. Has any other platform of that age replicated this (virtual desktops may be the closest thing).

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by nogginthenog

Everyone seems to be concentrating on games but planar modes have a huge advantage for a multitasking OS. You need only the memory that is necessary for your screen depth. I don't need 256 colours for a word processor, 4 is just fine. Chunky modes use a fixed number of bytes per pixel (I appreciate there may be some funky VGA modes).

The AmigaOS concept of Intuition Screens is just great. Has any other platform of that age replicated this (virtual desktops may be the closest thing).

No-one is talking about getting rid of planar modes, heck, in fact, they're needed for backwards compatibility, but just to ADD a chunky mode for the new-fangled VGA games like Doom.

[malko]

Originally Posted by activist

[...] rubbish. Apple survived. [...]

They did survive because they were better on a specific "niche" market than the same PC application.
Marketing agencies were using Apple for Photoshop/etc..
Offices were using PC for Word/etc..
Amiga ? They lost the "video" market and most of the AGA games were "poor brothers/sisters" ECS port with enhanced colours.
Not to mention the exorbitant prices of the cards for the Amiga, while the PC prices were falling slowly.

Then, how could have the Amiga survived in this context ?...

[Juz400]

CBM must have expected A500 users to want to upgrade to AGA or whatever when it came about but
as I said earlier it was nice to look at but very limited in expansion. I would also have
thought that people wanting to upgrade to a new level of Amiga were `serious users`
I bought a 1200 but it didnt feel like a serious bit of computing. A separate keyboard and baseunit
will always look more grown up and at 7 years old the Amiga should have been wearing `long pants`


Anyway, moving on a bit and looking at the VGA specs here states following:

http://martin.hinner.info/vga/timing.html

Res/Colours........Vert........Horiz................Pixel Clock
320x200x256......70 Hz.....31.778 KHz..........25.175 MHz

for a 50/60hz 15Khz display i guess we would need a Pixel Clock of at least 14Mhz
Please correct me if Im wrong
Would the RGB DAC need a read from a new memory location at the same speed?
Is there enough space in the Chip RAM BUS to perform this aswell as everything else?
If it was Fast RAM side, timing with all the other DMA would not be any issue?

Isnt this also the reason we have planar in the first place, available memory/BUS speeds from 1983-85?

[Thomas Richter]

Originally Posted by Foebane

No-one is talking about getting rid of planar modes, heck, in fact, they're needed for backwards compatibility, but just to ADD a chunky mode for the new-fangled VGA games like Doom.

The Amiga is not only a piece of hardware. It is also software. The graphics.library - which is the interface towards the graphics hardware - has no means for supporting chunky. The whole logic by which graphics works is planar. This is why RTG systems such as P96 or CGfx more or less replace major parts of the graphics subsystem by their own calls. It is not unlikely that CBM did not consider chunky feasible because it would have required major changes in the Os as well, probably an investment nobody dared to take at this time.

[roondar]

A small point before my replies: I referred to a $150 million dollar investment that Microsoft made into Apple twice now. This investment actually happened (I linked an article to it earlier). However, the article I read, as well as various other news sources I found about this investment severely misrepresented how important MS's involvement actually was.

Fact is that Apple still had quite a bit of cash at the time and though they had just lost nearly two billion dollars in a two year period, they were already on the road to recovery and as such didn't really need the investment all that much. Just thought I'd mention this because I don't like leaving false information hanging about.

Source: Apple's actual financial history (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histor...ancial_history)

Originally Posted by grond

And they all sucked.

That is 100% irrelevant (not to mention mostly false). The point is that you said they didn't make any when in fact, they did.

May be. If you really want to know it exactly, you will have to compare 030s to 030s, though. The rough estimate I made is good enough for me. My point was that a 33 MHz 030 with planar would have come out at the speed of a 25 MHz 030 with chunky-AGA.

Well, I tend to think that real world examples are more valuable than theoretical discussions. Mainly because I've seen first hand how things can seem correct in theory, but end up being false in reality.

On the topic of Doom on Motorola CPU's running chunky vs planar, I did post a video of two Macs running Doom (on 68030 & 68040) earlier and they ran much worse than the Amiga example by Vulture (and several other Amiga 68030 Doom videos I found), even though they had a chunky display and well over twice the graphics bandwidth. However... They didn't have the 68030 running at the same clock speed...

Unfortunately, a 100% like for like comparison is extremely difficult to do without having two machines with a 68030 at the same clock speed in them (one being an AGA Amiga and the other a 68030 with chunky display). I can't do this due to lack of a Mac, RTG card or say an Atari Falcon. So all I can do is look at what is available and draw some conclusions. And upon reflection it seems to me that evidence I've seen shows that the real world performance difference between chunky and planar was much smaller than I thought. To the point were it might as well not exist.

This result most definitely does surprise me, but it's still what I've observed recently and I tend to follow along were the evidence leads me. Even if it is surprising or not what I wanted/expected to see.

Hrhrhr, yes, I'm guilty of overusing extremes.

I've noticed that, yeah.

Yes, people use what's available to them. To me that doesn't make the 1000th scrolling shooter more interesting...

"People use what's available to them" is IMHO a fairly strange argument as it can be used to justify downplaying any feature in any piece of hardware.

Your personal dislike of certain game styles is not at all relevant here. We were discussing whether or not planar modes had any advantages left over chunky ones once you reach 8 or more bits per pixel. And, as has been shown, they actually do. The advantages of planar modes might not be what you need for the types of game you'd like to play, but that doesn't make them non-existent. Similarly, chunky modes have advantages themselves that are relevant for certain types of games. But that doesn't mean chunky modes have no disadvantages, or that some people might not be interested in the types of games that benefit from a chunky display.

I never liked the AAA features I heard about. The only use for chunky/planar modes are planar overlays over chunky images like they use a lot for video titleing.

Oh, this isn't actually about the merits of AAA. This was purely to show that the notion that no one at Commodore saw value in planar features or hybrid planar/chunky modes is not actually true.

Well, that's a fair bit longer than Commodore...

Quite true. But then again, contrary to what some people here might think, Apple was also much bigger and much more profitable than Commodore ever was. From 1982 all the way to 1994, Apple had much higher revenues and much higher profits.

They could simply afford to lose much more money during the bad years and also had much more financial room to invest into such things as the Power PC project (which helped them ride the tide and quite probably exceeded the total R&D budget of Commodore over their entire existence - including the investments made by the Amiga Corporation prior to being acquired by Commodore).

Perhaps ironically, Apple lost more money in 1996 than Commodore lost over their entire lifetime.

Besides, Bruce does actually have a point. It may have taken a few more years, but the Mac part of Apple essentially turned into a PC vendor with a funky OS. And that started all the way back in 1995-1996 with Power Macs that essentially were PC's with a different CPU.

Originally Posted by activist

Some backwards compatibility probably. Why restrict to one mode..

Amiga designers conceded in 1989 in hindsight pixel mode would have been a better choice.

The new AAA planar features are not in there for backwards compatibility and are not just part of one mode. They specifically point out that the 16 bit planar mode allowed for Dual Playfield mode with 2x256 colours. They also point out the somewhat dual/hybrid nature of most graphics modes. The new hybrid and half-chunky modes are not compatible with OCS/AGA Amiga graphics either. Nor is the 16 bit planar mode for that matter.

For reference, see the AAA overview by Dave Haynie: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/262...f3d441d3b2.pdf

As for this concession by the Amiga designers... By now you're sure to know how I operate: I've never heard of this. But I will gladly admit you're right if you can provide me with something that backs up your claim.

Survived though they did..

As I point out above, I actually think that Bruce's point has merit. Apple clearly managed to ride the tide in no small part due to them being a much bigger company than Commodore from pretty much day 1. They out-earned and outsold Commodore from 1982 onwards. Even in the very best year Commodore ever had: 1984.

After all, by 1996 the Mac was remarkably PC-like: it came with an IDE drive, PCI slots, standard PC power supply, etc. It really only had an odd CPU left at that point.

Aggregate bandwith of 400-600MB/s..whats not to like?

Ahem... 600 MB/sec indeed...

According to Dave Haynie (who was designing the AAA chipset), the bandwidth was "1.14x faster than AGA two cycle burst". That translates to about 32MB/sec. See the AAA overview I linked above.

[activist]

Originally Posted by roondar

But I will gladly admit you're right if you can provide me with something that backs up your claim.

sure. Go to 19'40" here:

[ Show youtube player ]

the question was "Is there anything you would have done differently to Amiga before it was released".

Originally Posted by roondar

Ahem... 600 MB/sec indeed...

Was just quoting from Dave Haynie public conference December 1993 in this old Amiga report edition:
http://www.amigareport.com/ar210/p1-3.html

You could probably easily explain why the 600 MB/sec figure is mistaken /theoretical if bothered

[grond]

Originally Posted by roondar

On the topic of Doom on Motorola CPU's running chunky vs planar, I did post a video of two Macs running Doom (on 68030 & 68040) earlier and they ran much worse than the Amiga example by Vulture

Which is why you can safely conclude that the Amiga Doom was optimised quite a lot more in the several years from the publication of PC Doom and Mac Doom to Amiga Doom. This makes comparisons across different computer or even CPU architectures even less meaningful. As I said, if you really want to know, you can take the Amiga Doom sources, replace the c2p with a simple mem copy and run the timedemo. You will only get to see garbled stuff on the screen but the result (printed in the CLI) will be 100% accurate for how a chunky-AGA-Amiga would have performed. I have written my share of c2p routines and code using it, my estimates are good enough for me.

And upon reflection it seems to me that evidence I've seen shows that the real world performance difference between chunky and planar was much smaller than I thought. To the point were it might as well not exist.

Come on, use some common sense! An 8bit c2p routines needs four passes of two moves, four ands, two shifts and two ors (and some more). One pass operating on two registers worth of pixel data thus already takes 24 clock cycles. All four passes hence 96 cycles plus loading and storing (which are the same for our hypothetical chunky-AGA and thus do not count). You cannot hide that many clock cycles on an 030 in chipmem access times for the planar data you are producing because you are running at only 14 times the chipmem cycle speed.

On the 060 (and possibly on the 040) you can easily do c2p in fastmem/cache in very little time and copy the data to chipmem while doing other useful stuff in fastmem. You can also do the c2p from fast to chip at copy speed. But that really doesn't prove that planar graphics aren't a disadvatage but rather how little sense it makes to combine an abysmally slow graphics bus with a fast CPU. In a well balanced moderately priced setup planar graphics were a lot slower for a Doom type game.

Your personal dislike of certain game styles is not at all relevant here.

Yes, as little as somebody else's dislike for Doom-type games. But I was also expressing how the majority of people felt at the time when the topic of planar vs. chunky graphics was important.

We were discussing whether or not planar modes had any advantages left over chunky ones once you reach 8 or more bits per pixel. And, as has been shown, they actually do.

OK, then I retract my statement that 8 bit planar graphics mode have absolutely no advantage over 8 bit chunky graphics modes and correct myself: 8 bit planar graphics modes have no relevant advantages and very big relevant disadvantages.

Oh, this isn't actually about the merits of AAA. This was purely to show that the notion that no one at Commodore saw value in planar features or hybrid planar/chunky modes is not actually true.

I guess they finally saw how little effort it was to support both chunky and planar modes and thus decided to do both instead of repeating the mistake of supporting only one of the two (the wrong one). This only underlines my point how simple it would have been to add chunky to AGA.

Perhaps ironically, Apple lost more money in 1996 than Commodore lost over their entire lifetime.

I have to admit I did not know how much bigger Apple apparently was and, since I'm not very familiar with any of their products, it seems hard to explain why they did so much better. We probably need another discussion about what Commodore did wrong while competing with Apple...

Besides, Bruce does actually have a point. It may have taken a few more years, but the Mac part of Apple essentially turned into a PC vendor with a funky OS.

Yes, but today there is hardly anything wrong with PC hardware. I have a hard time admitting it but, while I still don't personally use Windows at home and have no need nor want to do so in the future, it is also OK to use in its modern form. Computing devices are now almost exclusively defined by the software they run. And since there are so many solutions available, it boils down to a matter of taste and preferences. Pepsi or Coke? A surviving Amiga could have made the path more convenient even if it eventually had led to more or less the same place.